Recently I was helping a client with an Azure Active Directory integrated project ( ADAL not MSAL for some various reasons ) . All was going well and good as I plugged away with the various integration pieces. We are targeting Xamarin Forms on this project. Luckily there was a great blog post by Mayur…

I love Live Code Analyzers in VS2017. The analyzers help identify bad coding patterns, resource leaks and just generally aid one be a better developer by alerting when things are not done optimally. Fun story – for reals. I was engaged by “big ole firm” to do code analysis on .NET 4.6 system that’s “not…

.NET Core 2.0 Preview was released May 2017. Great timing as one of my customer was inquiring re DataTable and SqlDBADapter support in ASP.NET Core. Instructions to wire it up are below. First, pull down my ASP .NET Core 1.1 SqlClientPlay11 project from https://github.com/jhealy/aspdotnetcore. Instructions for building up this project are also at the previous…

I’d been working with a client who wanted to access SqlServer directly from an ASP.NET Core application. I’d been using Entity Framework for my ASP.NET Core access so I had to dig in a bit on this one, especially for his DataTable, DataSet, and SqlDbAdapter questions ( see part2 of this article ). Good news,…

Microsoft likes us to have some technical certifications. Personally I enjoy the challenges of the tests. This year my goals were the Windows 10 UWP Developer exam ( Developing Mobile Apps 70-357 – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-70-357.aspx )and the Xamarin Certified Developer accreditation ( https://university.xamarin.com/certification ). Earlier in the year I passed the UWP exam, so up next…

One of my favorite features in VS2015 is the Roslyn based live static code analyzers Interactive IDE feedback on my code gives me ‘opportunities for improvement’ to my code. Think FxCop++ without having to build your project. I like to say “in your face” developer education. See “bad things” and fix them before some other…

Xamarin has some great documentation. The article at [ https://developer.xamarin.com/guides/xamarin-forms/xaml/xaml-basics/getting_started_with_xaml/ ] shows how to get started with Xaml by using the Blank Xaml App ( Xamarin.Forms Portable ) template. The Blank Xaml App template sets up a project without any Xaml, just C# classes for creating a Xamarin Forms project. You must manually add a…

Xaml developers moving to Xamarin Forms are hoping to take some of their good habits from the Windows (WPF/Silverlight/UWP) dev world with them. And probably a few of their bad ones as well but we don’t want to talk about those. But sometimes the constructs the devs hope to find in Xamarin Forms are not…

Esteemed Xamarin evangelist James Montemagno ( https://twitter.com/JamesMontemagno ) has a fantastic cross platform plugin for working with connectivity scenarios in Xamarin. The plugin works with iOS, Windows UWP, Android, using Forms as well as native targets. The repository has full source code for the plugin. The repo also has some lightweight samples as well. As an exploration…

WordPress is a very popular platform. Using Azure plus Web Apps plus the Azure Marketplace you can easily spin up a WordPress site without having to touch any code. The provisioning process takes care of code installation, Web App initialization, and even creating a MySQL database for you. For one of my engagements I was…